Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

— Joseph Conrad

452. “I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a posi-tive relief, being something that had a right to exist – obviously – in the sunshine.”

— Joseph Conrad

453. “This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh.”

— Joseph Conrad

454. “I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.”

— Joseph Conrad

455. “Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together?”

— Joseph Conrad

456. “The human heart is a vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?”

— Joseph Conrad

457. “Give them all of my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.”

— Joseph Conrad

458. “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

— Joseph Conrad

459. “The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I.”

— Joseph Conrad

460. “I descended the poop.”

— Joseph Conrad

461. “There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”

— Joseph Conrad

462. “We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face:.”

— Joseph Conrad

463. “He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

464. “Those who tow’rds Acheron do not descend.”

— Joseph Conrad

465. “There can be no life without faith and love – faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That.”

— Joseph Conrad

466. “He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

467. “This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.”

— Joseph Conrad

468. “Lord, lay me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!”

— Joseph Conrad

469. “He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.”

— Joseph Conrad

470. “It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil.”

— Joseph Conrad

471. “Cried out to us, “Debark, here is the entrance.” More than a thousand at the gates I saw Out of the Heavens rained down, who angrily Were saying, “Who is this that without death Goes through the kingdom of the people dead?”

— Joseph Conrad

472. “Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well, – the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

— Joseph Conrad

473. “The work is not dear to me, but I’m glad for that which is in the work – a chance to find yourself.”

— Joseph Conrad

474. “Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship.”

— Joseph Conrad

475. “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,” he said.”

— Joseph Conrad

476. “Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its fate.”

— Joseph Conrad

477. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage.”

— Joseph Conrad

478. “My dear aunt’s endeavours to ‘nurse up my strength’ seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

479. “Our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright – an extra-terrestrial touch.”

— Joseph Conrad

480. “Then the earth for you is only a standing place – and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say.”

— Joseph Conrad

481. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

482. “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship;.”

— Joseph Conrad

483. “Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf – then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.”

— Joseph Conrad

484. “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

— Joseph Conrad

485. “The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.”

— Joseph Conrad

486. “When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.”

— Joseph Conrad

487. “Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don’t know how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise.”

— Joseph Conrad

488. “By an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and unspeakable pain.”

— Joseph Conrad

489. “It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception.”

— Joseph Conrad

490. “History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.”

— Joseph Conrad

491. “I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

492. “He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from the serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts.”

— Joseph Conrad

493. “Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia – and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk.”

— Joseph Conrad

494. “To the unblushing womankind of Florence To go about displaying breast and paps.”

— Joseph Conrad

495. “A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.”

— Joseph Conrad

496. “It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

— Joseph Conrad

497. “O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger, Vigils, or cold for you I have endured, The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!”

— Joseph Conrad

498. “The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar.”

— Joseph Conrad

499. “Long after he had vanished, Nostromo, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, “I am not dead yet.”

— Joseph Conrad

500. “The truth travels over the earth secretly; it seeks a nest among the people. To the authorities it’s like a knife in the fire. They cannot accept it. It will cut them and burn them. Truth is your good friend and a sworn enemy of the authorities – that’s why it hides itself.”

— Joseph Conrad